Giraffe by J. M. Ledgard Read Free Book Online

yet-vague swell. “Also here, to these two islands.”
    I indicate with a sweep the Heligoland Bight beyond Scharhörn and Neuwerk. “I’d also like to sail here.”
    “You must have seen the sea many times,” she says.
    I blush. I cannot lie so directly.
    “No,” I say. “I have only ever read stories of the sea.”
     
     
     
     
    I WAKE NOW in Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR. The compartment is empty. That is Saxony out there, so flat and untroubled; those are Trabant 601’s, little plastic wonder cars of DDR, putt-putting along moonlit country lanes overhung with elms and goat willows.
    East Berlin’s train station comes in an electric sign whose lettering, OSTBAHNHOF, brings with it an immediate sense of fictional Emil waiting at a street corner for a signal, and of me somewhere unborn in the Charlottenburg district, in West Berlin, flashing him that signal with a mirror from the window of an apartment. But my stop in divided Berlin is short. There is no thief for me to pursue: My wallet is untouched. I walk from this platform to another and board the night train to Hamburg. I arrange myself by the window. The train pulls out of the station, out past the columns of the great Pergamon Museum, within which I know are the winged bulls of Persepolis. Soldiers come into the compartment. They lower the blinds and secure the window against the dead of night with a padlock, so that I pass through the Iron Curtain unseeing and unseen, with only the stamping of documents to mark my release.
Emil
    JUNE 19, 1973
    I HAVE ARRIVED in Hamburg. It is just before dawn. The sky is orange and red. I was blind, but now can see — isn’t that what they sing in America? It is a little like that. There is no one watching me. There is no one at my back. I am the watcher now. I take a taxi to the port of Hamburg, where there might be a shore and wind and spume on the wind. I roll down the windows. I let the brightness of the northern dawntide pass in through the veins woven across my wrists. West Germany comes at me in different-shaped buildings and signs, in extraordinary cars and buses and in kiosks and flower stalls streaming with color. All this new information is painful to me. There is too much here to frame and stop.
    The taxi drops me off by the gates of the port. The East German freighter is pointed out to me. It is a narrow ax in the far distance. I walk toward it now in disappointment. The port is not as I hoped it to be. I want to be made aware of how far I have come, I want to walk down to a gravel beach. I want to frame a buoy and a lighthouse. I wish to teeter on a shore, over seaweed, and be overcome with a different kind of vertigo, that is not restricted flow through my vertebral artery, but a vertiginous sense of possibility. But there is no sea here: The sea is far away. The port is urban. The ships do not ride at anchor as Soviet battleships do, but bristle against one another in a hive. They bob on metal-colored water in narrow channels marked off by granary towers and bounded with toxic mud, where I see rats scattering now from one clump of weed and rope to another.
    I come under the rusting hull of my freighter. It is called the Eisfeld.
    “Who goes there?” a disembodied voice calls down from the deck in German.
    “Comrade Freymann,” I call in German. “Representing the Czechoslovakian Shipping Company.”
    “Come aboard then,” the voice says.
    I throw my bag on my shoulder and step up the gangway. It gives and sways under me. I go up slowly now in the knowledge that this ascent will be my only margin and I shall see no shore, no Cuxhaven, no islands of Scharhörn and Neuwerk. I shall not sail across the Heligoland Bight. I look down between the hull and the quay. I feel nothing: It is not nearly dizzying enough.
     
     
     
     
    I STEP ABOARD. I see the giraffes and am dumbfounded. I stop. I stare up. I have worked with one living giraffe, but an old giraffe, a zoo animal, weary, blind,